Donald C. Peattie

Donald Culross Peattie (June 21, 1898 – November 16, 1964) was an American botanist, naturalist and author. He was described by Joseph Wood Krutch as "perhaps the most widely read of all contemporary American nature writers" during his heyday. His brother, Roderick Peattie (1891–1955), was a geographer and a noted author in his own right. Some have said that Peattie’s views on race may be considered regressive, but that expressions of these views are "mercifully brief and hardly malicious".

Peattie was born in Chicago to the journalist Robert Peattie and the novelist Elia W. Peattie. He studied French poetry for two years at the University of Chicago and then transferred to – and graduated (1922) from — Harvard University, where he studied with the noted botanist Merritt Lyndon Fernald. After field work in the Southern and Mid-West United States, he worked as a botanist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (1922–1924). He was then nature columnist for the Washington Star from 1924 to 1935. At some point in the late 1920s Peattie and his wife, with their four-year-old daughter and baby son, moved to Paris to "launch the frail bark of our careers". At two days in Paris the daughter died "of a malady unsuspected and always fatal". In a "search for sunlight" they re-settled in Vence in the south. Another son was born there.

Peattie was an advocate for protecting the Indiana Dunes. He served on the Save the Dunes Council in the late 1950s, helping to bring Illinois' Senator Paul Douglas into the fight to protect the Indiana Dunes from industrial development.

Peattie's nature writings are distinguished by a poetic and philosophical cast of mind and are scientifically scrupulous. His best known works are the two books (out of a planned trilogy) on North American trees, A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America (1950) and A Natural History of Western Trees (1953), with woodcut illustrations by Paul Landacre. Peattie also produced children's and travel books, altogether totaling almost forty volumes. He also published the classic, botanical treatment on the Flora of the Indiana Dunes (1930).

An example of Peattie's views that can be construed as racist is the following, from "An Almanac for Moderns": "Every species of ant has its racial characteristics. This one seems to me to be the negro of ants, and not alone from the circumstance that he is all black, but because he is the commonest victim of slavery, and seems especially susceptible to a submissive estate. He is easily impressed by the superior organization or the menacing tactics of his raiders and drivers, and, as I know him, he is relatively lazy or at least disorganized, random, feckless and witless when free in the bush, while for his masters he will work faithfully."

• Vence, the Story of a Provencal Town through Five Thousand Years (published privately in Nice in 1930 and circulated only in France)
• Happy Kingdom (date unknown, written with Louise Redfield Peattie, published by Blackie & Son, Ltd. in Glasgow)
• Flora of the Indiana Dunes (1930)
• Trees You Want to Know (1934)
• An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
• Singing in the Wilderness: A Salute to John James Audubon (1935)
• Green Laurels: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Naturalists (1936)
• A Book of Hours (1937)
• The Story of the New Lands (1937)
• This is Living, A View of Nature with Photographs (1938)
• A Prairie Grove (1938), a narrative of the history and family home of naturalist Robert Kennicott
• Flowering Earth (1939)
• The Road of a Naturalist (1941)
• The Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge: The Story of the Southern Appalachians (1943), edited by Roderick Peattie ["The contributors: Edward S. Drake, Ralph Erskine, Alberta Pierson Hannum, Donald Culross Peattie [and others] ..."]; New York, The Vanguard Press.
• Forward the Nation (Armed Services edition) (1944)I
• Immortal Village (1945, a completely revised edition of Vence)
• American Heartwood (1949)
• A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950; 2nd ed 1966; Reprint as trade paperback with intro by Robert Finch, 1991. (Portions were previously published in The Atlantic Monthly, Natural History and Scientific American in 1948–49.)
• A Natural History of Western Trees, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1953; Reprint as trade paperback with intro by Robert Finch, 1991.
• Best in Children's Books (6) by Donald Culross Peattie, Phyllis Krasilovsky, Rudyard Kipling, and Rachel Field (1958)
• A Natural History of North American Trees (2007), an abridged one-volume selection from the previous two volumes
• The Rainbow Book of Nature (1957)

• Edited by Roderick Peattie, Donald's brother, this book contains long sections of some of his best writing, including a history of naturalist/explorers in the southern mountains, and some beautiful descriptions of the southern spruce-fir forest.
• This reprint contains 112 of the original 257 essays and 135 of the original 365 illustrations. It won the National Outdoor Book Award (Outdoor Classics, 2007).

• Peattie's papers, correspondence, and manuscripts, and those of Louise Redfield, are in the archives of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Davidson Library, Department of Special Collections.